Google plans Gemini 4 release before year-end

Google’s Gemini 4 AI model is in the early days of post-training, the phase in which a base AI model is refined to behave reliably, and should be released “much earlier” than the end of this year, Google DeepMind head Koray Kavukcuoglu told The Information at its AI Agenda Live Summit. Some Google observers have speculated that this could be as early as October. Kavukcuoglu recently replaced DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis as head of the Google business unit. The launch of Gemini 4 may lay to rest concerns about the delayed release of Gemini 3.5 Pro, which Google was originally expected to announce at its May 2026 developer conference. While less capable models in the Gemini 3 family have been frequently updated, Gemini 3 Pro has only been updated once since its November 2025 released. In contrast, OpenAI — spurred on by Sam Altman’s “Code Red” memo — has released three updates to its frontier AI model since then: GPT 5.5 Pro, GPT 5.6 Astro, and GPT 6 Astro. Anthropic, too, has updated its most powerful Claude model several times. Google has not been entirely idle in the AI arena, concentrating its efforts on updating less powerful, more affordable Gemini versions. In July, it announced three Gemini Flash models, aimed at more routine AI tasks, but the company remained silent about its high-end alternative. This article first appeared on Computerworld.